Daniel Fermín Pfeffer

Daniel FermínPfefferis an award winning Mexican-American filmmaker. He earned a BFA from NYU's Tisch School and an MFA for Screenwriting and Directing from Columbia University. His short film, While I Was Gone screened at various festivals and won the Denver Film Festival Domestic Student Award. His first feature, I'll See You Around, premiered in 2019 at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. I'll See You Around has since been picked up for distribution by Breaking Glass Pictures.

His first minisodic directorial effort, Chosen, premiered at the Catalyst Story Institute/Content Festival winning several awards and at the Austin Film Festival. His latest feature script, Brujería, combines social justice with psychological horror. It is about migrant farm workers who face violence and discrimination in upstate New York. Brujería is an official selection for Columbia University's annual Blue List (2020). In May of 2020, Daniel's commissioned music video, Hold That Weight received a Vimeo Staff Pick and is considered the third installment to his ongoing film work with childhood friend, Lucas Monroe. His latest directorial effort, a Latinx pandemic short film titled, Don’t Come Close screened at the 2021 Rooftop Films in partnership with Central Park SummerStage, the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, and HBO NY Latino Film Festival. Daniel most recently produced the independent pilot, Chiqui under his company banner One Love Picture Classics. Chiqui will have its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival under the indie episodic program.

Daniel has taught at Columbia University, Ithaca College, NYU, and Northwestern. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University and teaches screenwriting and film production for the Performing and Media Arts Department.

Jessica Bardsley

Jessica Bardsleyis an artist-scholar. Her interdisciplinary research takes an ecological approach to film and media within the global context of contemporary art. In addition to her work as a scholar, she is also an ecofeminist filmmaker. Her films have screened at top festivals like CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, EMAF, Hot Docs, RIDM, True/False, and on the Criterion Channel. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista, and numerous Film Study Center fellowships.Her research and writing have been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies.

Kriszta Pozsonyi

Brian Sengdala

Victoria Serafini

Victoria Serafini (they/them) is a PhD Candidate and queer filmmaker in Performing & Media Arts. Their dissertation project focuses on the queer intimacies of lesbian media and fandom cultures through an investigation of amateur pornography, quality TV, independent horror cinema, and fan remix videos. They are especially interested in how discourses of intimacy, domesticity, and violence are produced and maintained through contemporary media texts and cultures. In addition to their scholarly work, Victoria has also worked on student films, thesis projects, independent feature films and documentaries. Their two major passions within film production are production design and editing. Highly active in lesbian fandom circles online, they edit fanvids in their spare time.

Victoria earned their Bachelor's Degree in Cinema & Television Arts from California State University Fullerton in 2017. Their Master’s Degree was completed at Cornell in Performing & Media Arts in 2021.

Lexi Turner

Lexi Turner is an artist, scholar and PhD candidate in the department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London (from whom she received the Goldsmiths Excellence Fee Waiver Award), and a BA in Film Studies from King’s College London. Lexi’s dissertation “Decreativity: Shadows of Being and Horizons of Thought” invokes mysticism and pessimism as comparative philosophies of mediation in the analysis of film, sound, literature, and identity at the margins of culture.

Waylon Wilson

Samuel N. W. Blake

Zhen Cheng

Zhen Cheng(she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She specializes in performance and theater studies, avant-garde history, Chinese and Chinese diasporic studies, and Global Asias, with a broad research interest in 20th-century critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, and intermedia studies. She holds an MA in Performance Studies and a BA in English.

Rejoice Abutsa

Rejoice Abutsa is a writer, film producer, and Ph.D. student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Her research focus uses Black Media Studies, Gender & Women Studies, Film Theory, and Digitality to explore the transnational circuits of New or neo-Nollywood.